grinchy wrote:Very interesting, glad the forum is still doing well, another desktop user here, I can use my mobile to access the board but its better for my eyes on the bigger screen, that's what I get for being an old fart

Same here old fart with glasses need a big screen, good to hear the forum is still going strong, must admit this is the only place I really go now to get my vintage sw fix, cheers Edd and the rest for all your hard work

Really interesting Edd, thanks for posting up. I suspect the slight reduction seen in the last year has actually been seen across all formats, FB included. Even the bigger groups show a far more noticeable reduction in activity than this place does.

edd_jedi wrote:I was just looking through the forum's analytics statistics and thought I'd share a few numbers from the last 12 months for anybody interested. The fall of forums in favour of Facebook has been quite a hot topic for a few years now but not many people publish numbers.

Firstly traffic, as you can see over the last year there's been a slight fall in daily visitors, but not too much. The forum actually has more traffic now than it did when I first started collecting data in 2013, so it's nothing to worry about. We're currently looking at about 400 daily visits.

hits.png

Next up, devices. No doubt mobile phones have contributed to the popularity of Facebook, and as you can see here with almost half of users now accessing the forum via their phone you can see why some forums which are not mobile friendly have taken a hit. There are still a lot of desktop users though so it proves many people still prefer the big screen.

devices.png

And finally location. Although we are called "SWFUK" in fact only half of us are British. We have a large amount of American members, and a fairly global user base.

countries.png

If people are interested, I will try and remember to make a post like this annually

Interesting to see/read that info
I do think all platforms are dropping slightly though, I see Simon says similar above. The sales/auctions etc. on FB seem to have slowed in the past 6 months anyway, certainly of the better and more interesting things we were seeing on mass only 12 months before that... could be though that the FB groups have diversified again and again in that time, so the same sales happening across many more groups, making the largest groups seem quieter...
Anyway, SWF.uk is still healthy and that's a big tick from me.

Just thought I'd bump this thread with the latest annual stats. Looks like a slight decline year on year, but still regularly getting over 300 visitors per day. It looks like roughly 17% of those are returning visitors (ie members) so that equals about 50 'regulars' using the forum every day.

Can anyone guess what the big spike in March was? I can't remember anything happening that might have caused it (usually some kind of scandal!)